To Sleep, Perchance
by Black-throatedBlue
Summary: Regina shares a bed with Snow and Charming during the Missing Year. Between them, they have a lot of nightmares. (Regina/Snow/Charming.)


A/N: I wrote this as part of a longer Evil Snowing story that among other things explains how they end up together, but I expanded some of the points and this felt like its own independent entity so I had to cut it, but I like it anyway, so, I'm posting it here on its own. Set during the Missing Year.

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><p>Between them, they have a lot of nightmares.<p>

Charming is mostly past the post-sleeping curse nightmares, at least, but if they're not careful and get overtired or overstressed both Snow and Charming have recurrences. Regina feels almost aggressively un-guilty about them, spends time trying to re-engineer Rumplestiltskin's sleep bauble instead, but she never cracks it. When Charming wakes, gasping, Snow will wrap a hand around his jaw and pull him to her. Unsure whether she'd be welcome Regina at first ignored it, then weakened one day, smoothed a palm around one broad shoulder, and pressed chaste lingering kisses along between shoulder and neck. When Snow wakes, shrinking into the bed beneath her, Charming grasps her hand and reaches past her for the candles by the bed. Regina is more tentative here, a clear ritual with meaning she still associates with Henry, but she reaches out all the same, one day, leans over Charming and runs her fingers through Snow's hair.

There are other nightmares, of course. It's why Regina sleeps on the far side of Charming, away from Snow. It's closest to the door and easiest to leave, since Charming is more malleable in sleep than Snow. Sometimes she is so tired she just sleeps in another room without even trying, but the blankets are so cold and stark without bodies in them, the room so empty and quiet without their chatter. Far better to ignore and snipe at their happiness than to see and hear no happiness at all.

Regina's most predominant nightmares are about Henry, of course. Henry morphing into everybody else in the sun, mostly. Henry turns into Pan and then Daniel and then her father and then crying out as she rips out his heart; Henry turning into Greg and Greg turning into Henry and the two of them flipping back and forth as they switch on the electricity, Archie sitting to the side talking nonsense about custody. Henry buried alive under mayoral paperwork, an old stress-dream of endless forms, and she finds his dead body and then her mother takes him, and she never knows whether she's more distressed when her mother takes him affectionately from her and tells him as though it's a kindness that Regina could never have loved him, or when she takes him smilingly, cruelly, smothers him with magic bands and makes Henry's corpse smile a mirror of her own at most heartless, familiar and unnatural on his open friendly face.

Snow and Charming can do little for these later dreams, though they try when they're awake for them, but where Greg and Archie and Pan and even Daniel can be ameliorated with their presence, Cora's ghost hangs too heavy over Snow and Regina both and in these moments nothing can be done but make Regina glare.

Regina is not the most comforting presence for post-sleeping curse nightmares, either, and it doesn't please her to know it. When Snow and Charming wake and wake Regina in turn with their candles and their kisses, Regina comforts them as best as she's able, her once-kindness strongest when only first awake, and for precious minutes she remembers what it is to help others, but all too soon she is biting her tongue as they begin to settle, needing to ask "Did you see him? Did you see Henry?" but trying not to ask too soon. She thinks, from the way they twitch and frown when she does ask, that she fails in it.

They never do see Henry.

Regina tells herself she is glad of it.

Charming gets a lot of nightmares when Snow is newly pregnant. He will not talk about them until after he saves Rapunzel.

Snow acquires odd new dreams also, wakes herself by screaming aloud, clings to Regina and Charming, cries about arrows and electrocution and Regina doesn't know how to take that all her near-death experiences are Snow's nightmares, now, when the only nightmares she carries from Snow trying to kill her were dreams where she was trapped, bound, and Snow smiled triumphantly for eternity. One night she dreams that she didn't arrive in time to save Charming from the guillotine, a chess move not quite timed carefully enough, and water still washes down on Charming's head but she knows he's dead, turning rotten like fruit, and Snow appears above her, pushes down onto her in a mockery of sex and says she'll never forgive her, sprouting vamp-ish dresses and elaborate hairstyles and full Evil Queen makeup, strokes her forehead tenderly, revenge in her eyes.

For all that though, Regina knows herself to be better than she ought to be. She should perhaps dream of her other victims, of all her wrongdoings, but she doesn't. In the end, everything comes back to Henry and Snow and now, somehow, Charming. Even Rumplestiltskin just sits back in her dreams watching from the shadows, the harbinger that this dream will soon turn nasty. Perhaps it's only the Henry nightmares she has because they're the only dreams she ignores the warning of Rumplestiltskin's presence in, desperate and hoping that dreamscape-twisted memories of her time with Henry will remain unsullied that little bit longer.

She doesn't dream about Zelena at all.

She knows when Snow and Charming dream of her, though. When particularly stressed they seem to dream of always losing each other, thrashing about in the bed in frustration, muttering words of finding and loss. She ignores those dreams, or slips away quietly. It is clear enough that when they dream of endless struggle it is Regina they're struggling against. They don't see it that way, no guilt in their eyes and no turning from any comfort she can give, but she sees it that way and that is enough.

Perhaps this is what a guilty conscience looks like on her, after all, that when they dream that she has pulled them from their true love they struggle and fight and wake happier for seeing her face and it is this that she cannot bear. Maybe she just looks too different, dreamscape Evil Queen memories to sleep-tousled midnight concern, but she does not wait to ask.

She has good dreams too, but naturally it's the nightmares that linger most. She wakes from dreaming of Henry to the dark warm haven of their company, bolt upright, heart pounding, heartsick and terrified and expecting to be alone. They have always been there, however much she didn't wish it, and when she sinks into Snow's gentling and Charming's warmth she tries not to hold her own faith close that they always will be, one way or another.

She knows this comfort is a temporary thing.


End file.
